"Bug Incision is proud to be continuing our relationship with the San Francisco tag team of Jacob Heule (also known for his work with Ettrick and Barn Owl) and Tony Dryer. Earlier on in the Bug Incision game, we had the good fortune of releasing these two in conjunction with Jack Wright (bim-14), and also as part of a larger midwest-based ensemble called Storm of Corpses (bim-13).

Heule and Dryer have also maintained their own duo called Basshaters, and have a disc on Creative Sources from their trio with Jacob Lindsay. Over the years, they've managed to get themselves over to Europe a couple times, which is presumably where they hooked up with Håvard and Guro, two musicians who seem to have quite successfully overhauled their instruments' basic sonic identities.

It's kind of interesting how, for the most part, the melodic and harmonic activity in these pieces come from the basses (always a good instrument in plural, proven here), while the guitar seems to be content to exist as a sounding unit for all manner of physical manglings. The six-stringed playing on this record is in fact quite winning, coming across as a mixture of Christian Munthe's guitar anti-heroics (if you don't know him, do yourself a favour and look him up) and what Roger Smith might've sounded like if he'd forsaken his beloved nylon-string for a steel counterpart.

But back to the basses: while a lot of free-improvising double bassists automatically reach for upper end of their instrument's register, these two both share a fairly uncommon inclination towards the lower region of things. The reason that this is remarkable in a group context is that it means that our guitar and percussion overseers are exercising a wonderous amount of control, sensitivity, and a finely honed dynamic undertanding in order to make this work, not only in terms of a listener being able to hear everything, but also in their own abilities to communicate and react in the moment.

Jacob's effectiveness as a purveyor of avant-leaning percussive stylings is often evidenced in the frequent moments when it is a) not clear that there is a percussionist present at all, and b) very often it becomes very difficult indeed to make out who's doing what. As far and wide as Bug Incision has happily moved within the realm of improvised music, this is the kind of stuff we started out with, and continue to dig, wholeheartedly."-Bug Incision